A Power Unbound

"In public? In front of everyone? These are normal, decent people,” said Maud heatedly. “Most of them won’t see murder as a means justifying an end!”

“You have a naive view of normal people, Miss Blyth,” said Walter. “Public executions of dangerous criminals have always been well attended. They still report on hangings in the papers. That’s not murder. It’s the world being set right."

Something moved in Alan the way he imagined worlds moved in the dark of the universe.

Despite the gulf between their lives, they had this in common: neither of them was given to trust. Both of them had been twisted up by the plain facts of their existence. The past could turn you into a strip of paper with a single side, so that comfort and vulnerability slid away down invisible channels and couldn’t be grasped.

Except, perhaps, if you bent your will towards unlearning your own history. If you let yourself soften and be porous. Even if only like this, in silence, and at an angle.

There’s only so much fight in a person. If it never lets up, if they can never rest—it gets squeezed out of them, forever.

Alan had never been the oldest son or the coddled baby. He was the different one—the clever one. He’d barely been surprised when he was the invert one as well.

He said, “It was simple enough. After my pa died, I was a forger and a thief and a pornographer, and it meant everyone else could stay respectable. And then one day I stopped believing in God. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “So I told myself, well, that’s something, now stop believing in sin as well. Just drop it on the ground and leave it behind. I thought—I thought it’d be such a relief."

A feeling stirred in Alan as if hauled up from the well of his childhood, from the years when he believed in God and the saints and the powers of heaven and hell. At Mass, the sound of the chant was like standing knee-high in black water, shivering with delight at being overwhelmed by something larger. A power that was strong enough to hold you up when you were too tired to do it yourself, or hold you down when you were too restless to sleep.

"You should do your own bloody cleaning,” said Ross. “Work’s good for the soul.”

“Only for the poor,” said Jack. “I read that in the Morning Post, so it must be true"